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The nature and extent of past indigenous transformations in the Amazon basin is an actively debated topic, and one that has important implications for both conservation policy and the cultural heritage of its indigenous and traditional populations. The use of charcoal and phytoliths to measure past human impacts in non-lacustrine settings has become especially influential in this debate but has also generated disagreement among scholars regarding the possible limits of these proxies for detecting ancient land-use. To contribute empirical data to this issue, our paper presents the first attempt to study charcoal and phytolith signals from areas of modern indigenous land-use, in the Xingu Indigenous Territory, southern Amazonia. Our findings show that, while charcoal and early successional herb phytoliths are good indicators of land-use intensity, certain types of land-use leave subtler traces in the phytolith record that can hinder their detection. We demonstrate how using finer sampling resolution and comparing local proxy data on their own terms are necessary steps in order to identify trends in human land-use across time and space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Amazonian archaeology has made major advances in recent decades, particularly in understanding coupled human environmental systems. Like other tropical forest regions, prehistoric social formations were long portrayed as small-scale, dispersed communities that differed littie in organization from recent indigenous societies and had negligible impacts on the essentially pristine forest. Archaeology documents substantial variation that, while showing similarities to other world regions, presents novel pathways of early foraging and domestication, semi-intensive resource management, and domesticated landscapes associated with diverse small and medium-sized complex societies. Late prehistoric regional polities were articulated in broad regional political economies, which collapsed in the aftermath of European contact. Field methods have also changed dramatically through in-depth local and regional studies, interdisciplinary approaches, and multiculrural collaborations, notably with indigenous peoples. Contemporary research highlights questions of scale, perspective, and agency including concerns for representation, public archaeology indigenous cultural heritage, and conservation of the region's remarkable cultural and ecological resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]